For many companies, addressing the needs and concerns of its customers is important to the business process. For example, customers may want to purchase goods or services, change customer account features, voice a complaint, ask a question about the goods or services, or troubleshoot an issue with the goods or services. However, the way that customers interact with companies has become more complex, diverse and rapidly changing. For example, instead of relying primarily on phone calls or mail, customers now also expect to interact with companies via e-mail, text messaging, and online social media like Twitter and Facebook.
To cope with this new landscape of multi-channel customer contacts, and remain competitive in the marketplace, companies must adopt increasingly advanced marking and operations tools, information governance, and customer engagement systems. For companies with a large number of customers, a call center or service center may be used to handle large volumes of customer contacts that are received continuously. Some businesses have in-house service centers; whereas, others outsource service center needs to an outside vendor. In either case, service centers may employ a number of service agents that attend to customer needs and handle contact events.
Conventionally, service agents can be tasked with handling a wide variety of customer needs and customers, which is undesirable because it requires each service agent to receive training on handling many customer needs. Additionally, conventional service center systems require service agents to work in complex technological environments that often include simultaneously working with many different service, business and communication systems at once. Unfortunately, this often results in the service agents having only minimal proficiency in servicing any given customer need.
Some service systems allow for users to indicate their needs via an interactive voice response (IVR) system that allows users to select menu items via voice or by dual-tone multi-frequency (DTMF) tones that are generated by a phone or other device. However, many users incorrectly indicate their needs or simply override the menu and request immediate connection to a service agent (e.g., by pressing “0” or saying “speak to agent”). Accordingly, user needs are largely unknown when an agent receives a contact event, and service agents must still be capable of handling a wide variety of customer needs.
Customer relationship management (CRM) tools are increasingly used to handle the flood of customer contacts that a company receives, and such systems are largely deficient because they are unable to handle the increased complexity created by multi-channel contacts and such systems are unable to efficiently interact with the wide variety of outdated legacy systems associated with each given company. Moreover, conventional CRM systems are unable to efficiently assist customer service agents with handling customer contacts because conventional CRM systems are unable to understand the meaning of customer requests and are therefore unable to effectively aid customer service agents in addressing customer needs. In other words, conventional CRM systems cannot adequately identify and classify customer needs or issues and therefore cannot automatically improve the process of handling customer contacts without operator intervention.
In view of the foregoing, a need exists for an improved customer service system and method in an effort to overcome the aforementioned obstacles and deficiencies of conventional customer service systems.
It should be noted that the figures are not drawn to scale and that elements of similar structures or functions are generally represented by like reference numerals for illustrative purposes throughout the figures. It also should be noted that the figures are only intended to facilitate the description of the preferred embodiments. The figures do not illustrate every aspect of the described embodiments and do not limit the scope of the present disclosure.